September 7 – October 14, 2017

The paintings in Gustavo Acosta’s “Inventory of Omissions” may initially seem like discrete chapters in a visual essay on the oppressive bleakness of the modern city, but such a reading misses the point of his static but intensely hued portrayals of sites in Havana, Miami, New York, and Aleppo. A closer and more thoughtful observation of these canvases reveals the artist’s focus on drawing our attention to the small flashes of vitality and inspiration lurking within each setting’s apparent drabness, and quietly warning us about the things that threaten to obscure our awareness of the vibrant world that’s immediately around us. Throughout these works, there is a concern with engaging with the neglected and the antiquated in the hope of revealing its meaning and its living purpose for the present.

Acosta’s rectilinear overlays of strong, intensely moody colors are the defining element of a unique visual language that integrates multiple subtle allusions to reason and its traditions — the ideal planned-city street grid; the Golden Ratio and its long history as a supposedly true and self-evident compositional principle; the sharp-edged, no-nonsense Bauhaus aesthetic — each of which in turn so partly symbolizes humanity’s forceful and conceited imposition of a supposedly more perfect and efficient order upon nature’s seeming unruliness.

However, each filter-like patch of color also hints that there are life-affirming revelations awaiting discovery in the seemingly exhausted old world immediately around us. The dawn-to-midnight juxtaposition of yellow, maroon, and dark violet in Catalog of Missing Parts II (2017) suggests a single scene viewed at different times through disparate eyes; the painting’s sunny accentuation of a few lively windblown palm trees clustered alongside a massive, inert concrete complex speaks of life’s joyous persistence in the face of entropy, cultural stagnation, and humanity’s fussy and stubborn desire to forever halt time by means of structures and systems. Acosta has said that his use of color in these works is partly rooted in an old memory of people in his native Cuba crafting their own versions of color television by tinting their black-and-white screens with abstract patterns of bright pigments. The story is a perfect symbol of Acosta’s faith in people’s ability to create their way out of the stultifying constrictions of a programmed rational system, if only they can learn to look closely at the world around themselves in search of its small wonders.

Yet Acosta’s paintings also remind us of how easily memory and perception can become fuzzy, especially when technology and mediation intervene to obscure our most vivid and immediate experiences of the world around us. In The Temptation to Look Back (2017), the serene, dark-blue image of a ship’s wake is violently bisected by a thin, garish yellow band that distorts the sea’s graceful undulations into a garish pixelated parody (once again, a technological grid intrudes and has its way with the natural world). A view of Niagara Falls is given a similar treatment in The Shortcut (2017), with an added wrinkle: the scene is derived from an 1857 painting by Frederic Edwin Church, making Acosta’s canvas an image of an image, a scene twice removed from nature and twice distorted by an additional level of nostalgic artistic and historical mediation. In these images, Acosta hints that we must never take nature or our connection with it for granted; there’s always another intrusive and artificial system of control lurking on the margins, waiting to deaden our perceptions. As in his cityscapes, the question as to whether our use of the world will help us perceive its concealed spark of divine life or lead us to snuff it out through domination and neglect is left up for grabs, and it’s up to us to never let our perpetually endangered sense of wonder become permanently entombed beneath the rubble of our collective past.

An exhibition of work which posits the idea that creativity exists in not knowing, maybe the answer is “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”. Risk is imperative, but we still know very little about the potential of what works and why. The pendulum has always swung between abjection and elation. Qualities such as tenderness and humour connect this ensemble, a conversation often overlooked in favour of what can be read or justified. An exhibition showing a particular group of artists, who look to possess these qualities, inhabit new and old at the same time. History is apparent in a show like this but so is the future through the prism of the present.

The title refers to the Peter Bogdanovich film of 1971 “The Last Picture Show” which was shot entirely in black and white, harking back to an earlier time (again old and new) populated with a soundtrack of pop songs and presenting actors including Cybil Shepherd and Cloris Leachman at different stages of their respective careers in dialogue together. There seems no reason for the town they inhabit in the film (set in 1951) to exist, but the directness and simplicity of the depiction creates a space which allows for dialogue and a kind of transgression to occur?

There is a horror and a fascination in something as apparently permanent as a building, something that one expects to last many a human span, meeting an untimely end.
— Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War

All the shot works originate from the idea that the most valuable thing an artist can do is to record the world around them.
— Piers Secunda

Gathered together and displayed to potent effect at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, Piers Secunda’s ISIS Bullet Hole Paintings are the latest iteration of an ongoing project in which casts of bullet holes gathered from war torn or heavily militarized places are arranged into compositions that serve as both an indexical record of real world damage and a haunting reminder of the threat that contemporary armed conflict presents to our collective history. These works were created through a painstaking and sometimes risky process.
In late 2015 while under the protection of Peshmerga (Kurdish) soldiers, Secunda visited Iraqi villages recently liberated from ISIS and made direct casts of the damage inflicted on walls and other structures by gunfire. On returning to the studio, he arranged these within flat molds derived from ancient Greek and Assyrian artworks, poured in white industrial floor paint, and left it to set. The resulting objects are stark and compelling evocations of the barbaric violation of cultural heritage that is all too common in contemporary wartime. The violent erasure of noble classical imagery—gods, kings, elegant warhorses—beneath Secunda’s constellations of bullet-hole disfigurement elicits an acute feeling of loss and decay. In Assyrian Horse and a relief from the Pergamon:

Temple of Zeus (both 2016), the annihilation unfolds as a sequence of discrete moments frozen in time, with each succeeding panel rendered more fragmentary than the last until there is little to nothing of the original image discernable. Temple of Zeus is particularly pointed, for its use of a slick and absurdly faultless nineteenth-century restoration of the Pergamon Altar seems to hint at the futility of the age-old human desire to reverse the course of time in search of Eden.
Despite the obvious sculptural quality of these works, Secunda considers them to be a natural outgrowth of his continuing evolution as a painter, and has sometimes described them in terms that evoke the centuries-old tradition of arresting time’s passage in paint and freezing fleeting moments before they’re gone forever.

Although the ISIS Bullet Hole Paintings were not conceived as political statements per se, their emergence from his desire to capture the texture of geopolitics in paint has resulted in a body of works that succeeds as both a record of the ravages of time—aided in this case by much human brutality—and as a meditation on how fleeting and fragile even our greatest cultural achievements really are.

My abstraction starts with testimony of the violent actions on the dissidents, but more than a political statement I prefer to talk about the silence in the civil society and art. The artworks absorb the cynicism of this society, they are ironically based on the human drama found in images and words. – José Vincench

As an artist who lives, works, and raises his family in Cuba, José Vincench’s personal experience stems from a place where the fabric of free thought and expression is compromised. But seeing it through positive irony, the artist points the finger at this negative reality by creating works with hidden meanings embedded in deliberately smoothly executed and decorative gold abstractions. Vincench’s engaging creations provide an enticing combination of politicized practice, conceptual soundness and polished works of art.

In his geometrical abstractions, he applies a set of invented codes and characters to create a simplified alternate discourse and experience. In his action paintings, he references the defacement of dissidents’ homes by government enforcers (unreported in the controlled press) in a sheen of illuminating gold.

Images of strife are transformed into a shimmering landscape of gold abstraction. The depth of the dissident movement, with its suppression and injustices, is displayed in a vision that seeks an idealized sense of order.

A gold painting has its seductive allure in the metaphor of gold and vibrations of light, giving depth to the surface of the painting. In this group of José Vincench’s most recent Revolución series, the canvases, large, medium and small, create a world of opposites.

Against the use of rhetoric as a means of symbolic domination, criticism, or attempt to transform social reality by activism, José Vincench applies his own sets of characters, idioms and codes to freely deconstruct this reality in exquisite golden works of art.

This is José Vincench’s second exhibition at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel. One of his sculptures is currently showing at The Bronx Museum, “Wild Noise”, through July 3.

Vincench is a tenured professor at the graduate program of the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. His works are in the collections of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Havana; Frost Museum, Miami; Rubin Foundation, New York; Perez Collection, Miami; UBS Art Collection, New York; Chris von Christierson Collection, London; Celia Birbragher Collection, Miami; CIFO Collection Miami, among other public and private collections worldwide. He is the recipient of the 2016 Art Nexus-EFG Bank prize.

Working across diverse media, including painting, photographs, mixed media, video, these artists pursue the addiction of art from varying and unique points of view. Brought together, their vibrant works create a space for seductive engagement and thoughtful perceptions.

The exhibition effectively extends the continuum of abstractions in color that have engaged the artist in recent years. Fusing schematic shapes and fragments, her apparent abstractions recall a flash of connections through time, or maybe a glimpse of switching of identities, or the way an interior, or an external, space may be seen via moving digitized images. We are drawn by the vivid light and color of her paintings and are left with a test in our bringing an identification of her imagery.

The exhibition is accompanied by new monograph ‘Fake New World’ with an essay by Gail Levin.
“Diana Copperwhite makes big bold oil paintings that excite and stir our twenty-first-century perceptions. Her compelling images are both complex and energetic. She is never at a loss for the impulse to paint, though she is coy about revealing her concerns, often throwing the viewer just a few clues and leaving a lot of room for the imagination. She creates an exquisite tension between abstraction and figuration or representation of any kind. She appears to tease out this tension to hold our interest, as we both take in the visual splendor of her paintings and try to fathom what they are about.” (Excerpts from Essay)

Gail Levin PhD, Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of CUNY.

Diana Copperwhite, born 1969, lives and works in Dublin. Copperwhite has exhibited widely in Ireland and other countries in Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include Driven by Distraction, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 2016, A Million and One Things Under the Sun, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, 2015, Shadowland, Thomas Jaeckel, New York, 2014, solo presentations at PULSE NY, 2015 where she was nominated for the PULSE prize and at Volta NY, 2013. Copperwhite was awarded the AIB Art Prize in 2007 and her work is held in many important public collections, including the Office of Public Works, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Dublin Institute of Technology as well as private collections in Ireland, across Europe and in the United States.

We are pleased to present Susana Guerrero’s first US solo exhibition, Anatomy of a Myth in New York.

Through her inventions, Susana Guerrero is set upon taking up themes of mythology and utopia (mythopia), bringing together a genealogy of the materials, an anthropology of human experience, guided by the murmur of a dream. She allows a perceptual interpretation of a different kind.

Many of Guerrero’s artworks evoke a contemporary mythology that puts on the same plane the visible physical reality, the substance of dreams and the subconscious, the hidden reality.

There’s a kind of reformulation of ancient mythologies, constituting personal thoughts of the sacred through mythical stories, traditions and legends, superstitions and intuitive revelations.

In the process of making the artwork, Guerrero reveals a binding ritual. The choice of every material, the configuration of every shape, of every element, brings a poetic meaning and symbolism to her artwork.

Indications of imaginary blood and path through veins and arteries, active heart, organs out of place yet connected to a life system. Guerrero may posit a relatively fractured or whole woman, or a person in different bodily states. As she makes the crisply graphic work, more figurative forms are mixed with unspecifiable shapes or abstracted forms in parts of her composition.

Her most vivid construction would be derived from a varying “mythopia”. The result is formed with features that may be confrontational or bacchanal. Parts of it may be supposed to urge identification or resist it. In this case, the filling of the space often places a situation akin to a breaking out, a way of purifying the spirit and getting to new ideas.

A woman races from nowhere to nowhere through an indistinctly rendered forest. A loose scattering of young men hovers in a strange white space, suspended in time. Solitary wanderers traverse barren plains toward destinations that loom invitingly in the distance, yet fade into disheartening insubstantiality upon arrival. At every turn, there is the sense of something forever sought but never seized.

In his first solo show in the United States at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, Bernard Ammerer depicts a private domain of desolate landscapes and vaguely restless figures that would border on the surreal if it didn’t feel so eerily familiar. Across the exhibition’s dozen canvases—all from this year and last—we see small cliques of physically and psychologically isolated people at uneasy rest or in frantic motion; cloud-filled skies looming serenely over flat, featureless, stark-white plains; and lone travelers in obscure territories that are shrouded in fog, reduced to cartoonish black silhouettes, or completely replaced with generic words—Wood, Field—that diminish nature to a worthless and empty abstraction.

Ammerer’s pointed and ironic titles often hint at the somber thread of disaffection that ties these works together. Interface—a six-foot-square canvas depicting a constellation of nondescript young men in jeans and t-shirts frozen mid-leap in a white void—is most notable for the palpable lack of physical and psychological interaction among its inhabitants. Fulfillment Problem—that bland euphemism from the realm of online commerce that so often signifies corporate ineptitude and consumer frustration—is paired with the image of a cloudy yellowish sky overrun with a chaotic, maze-like swarm of identical running figures lifted from a Children At Play traffic safety sign. The infantile and perpetually unsatisfying urge toward instant gratification that’s satirized here is subtly underscored by Boyhood, which presents the sad and wistful disembodied head of a child floating alone in a dark, nebulous space. It’s the only place in these works where an actual face can be seen, and its stark difference from the other canvasses hints at an irrevocable loss of naive serenity that no hoard of shiny toys, transient pleasures, or wanderlust can amend. The moral—for Ammerer’s oblivious protagonists as well as us—is perhaps best embodied in Home, with its ghostly white house at the end of a blank path in a barren field: far too often, our ill-considered quests away from ourselves in pursuit of the Next Perfect Thing leave us alone and exhausted before a hollow apparition.

Elio Rodriguez

April 1 – May 14, 2016

Elio Rodriguez’ first solo exhibition in New York City is comprised of large scale soft sculptures and will be on view at 532 West 25th Street until May 9, 2016. Coinciding with his exhibition On Guard, at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for Afro-Latin Studies and Context Art New York, Pier 94, May 4-8, 2016.
An opening reception for the artist will be held Thursday, March 31 from 6 to 8 p.m

Elio experiments with the construction of the intimacy of interior and exterior spaces, all things carnal and decorative, functional and artistic, manufactured and native. His soft sculptures reimagine familiar forms using, in abundant measure, plant and carnal shapes, juxtaposed against sundry objects, metal screws, lace corsets, chains, belts, wire, filament, pins — with results that are pictorial equivalents of familiar concepts and concerns.

In his stuffed, massive soft sculptures, loaded messages about stereotypes, sexual or racial or otherwise, are hidden within exaggerated, provocative rendering of the mysteries of organic, invasive fauna, entangled in space by which a far-out untamed nature is introduced. Lush, ritualistic, magical, multiple perspectives serve as metaphors for the state of his own Afro-Cuban-ism coalesced with the state of the female, as might be interpreted through the popular discourse in our modern times.

Elio’s work may veer into a kind of kitsch, but he does so magnificently in the most unlikely, playful, witty, voluptuous, sensory, sensual ways.

Elio Rodríguez (Havana, 1966) graduated from Havana’s Higher Institute of Art (ISA) in 1989 and quickly became one of the leading figures in the new Afro-Cuban cultural movement that emerged in Cuba during the 1990s. He has had solo and group shows in Latin America, Europe and the US. In 2015, Elio was the Cohen Fellow at the Du Bois Research Institute and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. His artworks are part of important public and private collections, including National Arts Museum of Cuba; Von Christierson Collection, London; Shelley & Donald Rubin Collection, New York; Peggy Cooper Crafritz Collection, Washington DC; W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.

THE WEIGHT OF WORDS

José Angel Vincench

February 26 – March 26, 2016

Thomas Jaeckel and Rachel Weingeist are pleased to announce recent works by Cuban artist, Jose Vincench in The Weight of Words, an exhibition of painting and sculpture. Works by the artist will be exhibited concurrently in Jaeckel Gallery and at the Pulse New York art fair (Booth A209, March 3-6) and the University of Tampa’s Scarfone Hartley Gallery, FL (March 4-18).

A key figure in Cuban contemporary art, Vincench is identified in his latest works with visually aseptic, abstract imagery that is largely heir to the legacies of concrete abstraction, conceptualism, and language-based art. His work often reflects an underlying process of deconstruction meant to express his experience within the social-political actuality of Cuba today, especially the use of rhetoric as a means of symbolic domination and referencing the sometimes tragic aftermath of resistance and dissent. Thus Vincench positions himself within a still central dichotomy of art-making in post-revolutionary Cuba: between the inner search for beauty, self-awareness, and art for art’s sake, and the more outward-facing urge to reflect on, criticize, or attempt to transform social reality by activism. (David Horta)

In works on canvas from his ongoing series, Vincench uses the geometry of highly charged Spanish-English cognates, such as Autonomia (Autonomy), Gusano (Worm aka Traitor), Exilo (Exile). Stacking the letters on top of each other using a personalized iconic geometry, Vincench builds his own vocabulary and meaning. Today it is the Gusanos (Traitors) who are able to provide capital to reinvest in their motherland, ironically.

Gold leaf works on canvas and Action Paintings (Pintura de action), splattered gold illuminations depict rarely documented and often not reported incidents of paint thrown at the houses of Cuban dissidents. An appropriation of these little known, low resolution Cuban image files, pixelated and distorted, are sweetened by the artist’s decorative gold interpretations.

Vincench: “Gold leaf provides me a seductive, poetic and lyrical old world craft material. I am intentionally creating a decorative product, ironic historical reality of yesterday and today, where we can forgive and reconcile. My abstraction starts with photos, testimony of the violence of the government on the dissidents, but more than a political statement I prefer to talk about the silence in the civil society and art. The artworks absorb the cynicism of this society, they are ironically based on the human drama found in images and words.”

Vincench’s paintings and sculptures are simultaneously intellectually challenging and conceptual works with resplendent minimal appeal.

A respected Professor at the infamous graduate program of the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba, Vincench’s work is a part of numerous private and public international collections including: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, La Havana, Cuba; Pizzuti Collection; CIFO Collection, Miami, FL; Frost Museum, Florida International University, Miami; Perez Collection, Miami; Shelley and Donald Rubin, New York, NY; Chris von Christierson, London, UK; Estrella Brodsky, New York, NY.

through feb 22

Jaeckel Gallery is pleased to present a winter group show. This show features many returning artists to our gallery, as well as a few artists showing with us for the first time. The works on view include smaller scale works in a variety of mediums.

To highlight just a few. Text-based “Witt” drawings by Alastair Noble, a meditation on Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Colour”, communicate the colors mentioned and the content in Wittgenstein’s text about the ambiguities of light and color. John Parks’s delicately painted “Garden with Soldier” presents a wistful and very gently ironic vision of his English heritage. Holger Keifel’s photograph of Louise Bourgeois ‘Hand with Clay’ exists in a hidden message or puzzle. Kathy Bruce’s eclectic signature mix of collage and drawing takes a more classical turn in her “Adaptive Behavior” series. Abstract paintings by Jac Lahav evoke the philosopher’s stone, magical talismans, his youth by the Mediterranean. Ilyan Ivanov’s “Self Portrait” paintings explore the ambivalence between geometric structure and free brush strokes, reflecting one’s own personal conflicts between convention and spontaneity. In Kylie Heidenheimer’s “Carnival”, she twists and wrests space via “drawn” line and intentionally placed marks. Marcy Brafman’s “Cents Rubbing Bestine” is a meditation on the magnetic field where the invisible runs the show, a place half remembered.

Each of the artists featured in the show speaks in a distinctive voice.

For his first solo show at 532 gallery Danny Rolph presents a new body of work made over the last year. The visual impact of Rolph’s works engages the viewer’s senses in a delicious ferment. The high velocity color and fractured narratives explored in these recent paintings show an uncompromising commitment to explore the compositional potential on all the canvases and triplewall plastic that he works upon. Many references populate these new works. The influence of Pop Art as well as Vermeer’s studio narratives and Tiepolo-like skies are located in the sharp, delicate, clean, irregular and emotive compositions he employs. They are spatially indulgent and adhere to a vocabulary indebted to the power of visual discovery.

Rolph has an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art, London and was awarded the Rome Scholarship at the British School at Rome. He is a professor of Fine Art at Bucks New University and is a visiting lecturer at the Royal Academy Schools, London. Rolph’s recent solo exhibitions include ‘Paradiso’, Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston 2014; ‘Atelier’, E.S.A.D. Valence, France 2013; ‘kissing balloons in the jungle’, Poppy Sebire gallery, London 2012 and ‘ten minutes from now’, Eden Rock Gallery, St.Barths, Caribbean 2011. His work is represented in many international collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London.

The paintings by Darrell Nettles in Broken Verse are ergodic in the deepest and most satisfying sense of the word: although they require a great deal of effort to unlock their secrets, the engagement they demand makes an encounter with them a rich and rewarding experience. Nettles’ linguistic impressionism employs the gravid ambiguity of language to reveal its deeper treasures; his visual meditations on the images and sounds of human communication owe as much to Klee and Kandinsky’s conflations of visual and musical composition as they do to the playful semantic games championed by the wordsmiths of Dada, Fluxus, and Pop.

Broken Verse is anchored by a series seven-foot-tall canvases arrayed edge to edge with dense pseudo-cryptographic patterns of thin block letters that are tightly juxtaposed and overlapped on soft-edged crossword puzzle grids. Elements have been added, effaced, and replaced into dense palimpsests; words emerge and sounds arise as the eye follows its own course. An underlying architectonic uniformity hints at a clandestine dialogue between the canvases. They speak from their own side with the compelling but exasperating self-assertion found in ancient cyphers and obscure old alchemical engravings.

In his most recent paintings, Nettles has gravitated toward texts that are more immediately legible on first glance, yet ultimately no less mysterious. Snippets of conversation torn from everyday life run from top to bottom in a font that recalls hand-stenciled shop signs; disjunctions and deliberate sidetracks are the mortar that holds them together. Phrases are stacked, clashed, amputated, and sometimes ripped apart and scattered chaotically. The resulting bits of quasi-proclamation and pseudo-communication are both sinister and amusing by turns, calling to mind the gentle snark of Ed Ruscha’s late-1970s word pastels: “drug allergy fake” loiters just far enough from “radical wonton” to establish plausible deniability. Ghostly snippets of text murmur faintly in the background like a mildly sarcastic chorus, echoing, multiplying, and subverting surface meanings (is that “permit tonight” or “hermit night”?). Behind the chatter’s misdirection is the nagging sense of a deeper significance that awaits excavation and exegesis. Nettles’ works dare us to acknowledge the primal and sometimes neurotic need we have to make sense of it all, and the magical ability that language has to both fulfill and thwart that need.

New Paintings by Julie Langsam

April 30 – May 30 2015

In her newest exhibition Tomorrow-land, Julie Langsam presents structures built specifically for mid-20th century World’s Fair exhibitions: Philips Pavilion designed by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis, the Tent of Tomorrow & Observation Towers by Philip Johnson and Habitat by Moshe Safdie. In choosing these structures Langsam brings an additional level of engagement to her ongoing exploration into how our ideals as a society are manifest in our collective culture.

In addition to the on-going ‘landscape’ series, Langsam continues to introduce new structures to her body of architectural scenes. Small brightly-colored paintings of floor plans assert the abstract qualities of the architectural blueprint, a two-dimensional depiction of a three-dimensional space. A large collaged floor piece made out of carpet depicts the floor plan of the Director’s Housedesigned by Walter Gropius in Dessau, Germany for the Bauhaus school. Color in these works is chosen through a random system.

In a series of drawings presented in a grid, walls are redacted and covered, [parts of buildings and the adjacent landscape] are replaced with a field of graphite gray. This [simultaneous veiling and overlay] conveys an absence, a void to be filled, but also embodies a curious push/pull effect: the graphic blocking and blotting out of surfaces serves as an intermediary screen that disrupts a structural coherence in reading these pictures. Gray squares, rectangles, trapezoids jump from drawing to drawing. While these images appear historically distant, they are also reanimated.

Langsam’s work playfully negotiates and questions the legacy of modernism on contemporary culture. Representations of toxic landscapes reference the painterly sublime, serving as the ground for modernist architectural marvels, structures that evoke notions of failed utopias. Her work is rendered in a curious flatness, where edges of iconic formalist, modernist paintings are flanked against photographic representations of the building. For Langsam, the canon appears less as a ‘barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through. The works presented suggest an attempt to navigate multiple legacies at once negotiating personal memory with art historical and institutional history.

Once again it is a great pleasure to exhibit new paintings by John Alexander Parks and most especially because he has recently been making paintings about New York, his adopted home for more than three decades. For much of this time Parks has painted subjects that bear on English life using his vantage point as a British exile. Those pictures are often at once nostalgic and gently ironic. Parks brings a new energy, lively wit and considerable poignancy to his very personal vision of New York.

A gifted colorist, sensitive draftsman and delightful handler of paint, Parks mixes whimsical humor and enormous sympathy for his subjects. His works are inviting, accessible and entertaining but their full import can take time to sort out and fully savor. They are the paintings of an artist who is thoroughly and wonderfully engaged with the world around him.

Although he has kept a modest profile as an artist Parks has accrued some serious critical acclaim over the years. Writing in the New York Times as long ago as 1982, the great critic John Russell described Parks as “…a true poet in paint and something of a find.” In December of 2012 Roberta Smith, the current chief art critic of the Times, described Parks’ painting as “…a treat to discover.”

Parks was born in Leeds, England in 1952, and studied at the Royal College of Art in London. He has lived in and around New York since 1976 and was represented for many years by Allan Stone, the legendary art dealer and gallerist. He is a member of the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York where he teaches drawing and painting. He recently authored a general introduction to the world of art entitled “Universal Principles of Art,” Rockport Publishing, 2014. His work is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design and many others.

The steady erosion of the United States embargo against Cuba, since 2009, has given hope to many there and abroad that normalization between the two countries is possible. On the island, opportunity, or the perception of it, are more plentiful than ever. Many Cubans are celebrating the potential bounty, hoping that electronic connectivity and open trade are now or soon will be within reach.

The educational system in Cuba has produced prolific and undeniable talent whose artwork is now being lauded by art critics, curators and collectors as the best-kept secret in the art market today. The process of passing on a lineage under the Cuban system of student to artist to professor is as persistent and durable as Cuban culture itself.

En Voz Alta “gives sudden voice to an easy coupling of artists,” according to Rachel Weingeist, the curator, who wanted to respond to “the emotions that Cuban artists are expressing – generated by the recent political shifts.”

Everyone wants to know what is next in Cuba’s future. Perhaps artist duo Meira Marrero and José Toirac’s tarot card deck, bound in leather of 24 cards, titled Profile, will shed light. This work is charged with symbols inspired by the iconic interview that resulted in One Hundred Hours with Fidel, the infamous tell-all in the words of the Revolutionary himself, published in 2006.

In this exhibition, as art often manifests, humor and the realities of daily routine are intertwined. All of the artists in this show are influenced by current and recent political events: Douglas Perez’s painting, December 17th in the White House, refers to President Obama’s announcing the restoration of a diplomatic relationship with Cuba, and we witness Michelle and Barack Obama dancing on a banquet table, dishes flying in celebration.Duvier del Dago, well known for his light and string drawings, positions a larger-than-life nude Cubana at a podium set in a futuristic public square, orating to a raucous and fictional crowd. María Magdalena Campos-Pons, revered for her sensual imagery, offers Unspeakable Sorrow, a ceremonial black-on-black portrait of despair, loss and abandonment, a howl, in which the flowering Amaryllis is the only trace of life or color.

Rachel Weingeist is a contemporary curator and cultural advisor who has curated over twenty-five Cuban exhibitions that range in theme and scale. Over the last five years, Weingeist built the largest private Cuban art collection to date and created the first contemporary Cuban video archive, which has traveled widely. She is a member of the Harvard Cuban Studies Advisory Board and actively participates internationally in cultural and political dialogue.

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel presents an exhibition of work by Ira Richer.
Including recent paintings and earlier works in Formica that were shown at Nosei Gallery.

When describing the work Anthony Haden-Guest writes:

These pieces combine deft materiality and wit. As with the hammer, the magnet, the exclamation point, the scribbled title in “Gulf”. So too the paintings. Richer’s palette inclines to early summer and isn’t scared of black. Note the shadow in “The Yellow Cave”. His line can be at once elegant and muscular as in the “Massage”Painting in a way reminiscent of early Hockney – and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that – but where Hockneys are purposefully allusive, something anecdotal, these are simply what they are. A fully-formed figure is often a presence, as dominant as in Munch or Dubuffet, but as with these artists, they are not borrowed from elsewhere. The picture-plane is the petri dish in which they exist. Nothing decorative, every form has meaning, but it is often enigmatic.

An engaging shape that is central to two canvases looks somewhat like a tuber or – it is pinkish – might it be a human organ? It doesn’t matter. Richer’s form happens to be based on a female figure, bending. Behind her, on one canvas is the table at which Cezanne’s card players are seated and the other seems to sport black shoes and gloves. Hamlet, toying with Polonius, says: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Decoding forms is a natural function of the brain.

So the paintings in the show look kind of radical in a period of when so much that floats its seemingly critic-proof way through the market looks strategic rather than felt. “When I think of Munch’s Scream. I think how lucky he was to have a pier to scream on above Oslo, by himself all alone.” Ira Richer says, “Man has become a species whose land is reduced to a table top. His existence is engineered and contorted by others. And the last indignity- is- we have to hold our smile”. I see fugitive signs that the times may be a-changing though.

These paintings are such signs of life.

Ira Richer studied at Cooper Union (BFA) and at Yale University (MFA). Ira is a Professor of Drawing and Advanced Painting at the School of Visual Arts, New York. His work is in the collection of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation Arles, France; the Bob Blackburn Collection/Smithsonian Institute; the J.Patrick Lannon Foundation; the Francisco Pellizzi collection; the collection of Lucien, Yolande and Ann Clergue among others.

The writer Anthony Haden-Guest has contributed to the Financial Times weekend column on art collecting, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New York Observer, Art Forum, Esquire UK .

Diana Copperwhite

November 13 – January 10, 2015

When describing Diana Copperwhite’s work Colm Toibin wrote:

“Her work is about painting first and foremost; [these] references merely serve a purpose. Thus digital images which freeze and fragment an original image fascinate her, but such images in themselves are not enough, they provide a way into the painting. It is their visuality which inspires rather than any precise sense of a blurred or fragmented reality. Because she physically likes making paintings, everything is subservient to what paint will achieve.”

Copperwhite makes paintings that move fluidly between representation and abstraction. Photographs, montage and assemblage all aid the process and become ancillary works that pin down fleeting thoughts, glimpses and reactions to a media saturated age. Her interests and sources are eclectic and wide ranging, from social media to philosophical debate to art historical references. Yet, as Toibin points out, her paintings are no more about the image than they are about the process of painting itself. Her work is phenomenological in that momentarily emotional responses override the need to capture reality. Something has piqued her interest and from that initial interest she thinks in colour, in tone, and texture, in setting herself a visual problem to which there is no single definitive solution. Her palette is composed of murky undertones punctuated by bright neon rifts. The fluidity and expressiveness of the painting gives little hint of the rigorous and formal abstract principles applied to the making.

Diana Copperwhite studied Fine Art Painting at Limerick School of Art and Design and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She completed an MFA at Winchestor School of Art, Barcelona in 2000. Diana is a tutor at the National College of Art and Design,Dublin. Her work is in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Arts Council of Ireland, and also in collections in the United States, Europe and Australia.

The writer Colm Toibin is currently Irene and Sidney B Silverman Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. He is an IMPAC Dublin Literary Award prizewinner, and has appeared on the Booker shortlist, most recently in 2013 for his play the Testament of Mary.

Over the arc of his career, Ian Hughes has honed a distinctive visual language in which paint reveals its lushest and most viscous qualities while simultaneously giving shape to bio-reminiscent forms that have a compelling life of their own. In Twisted Figures, his third solo show at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, Hughes’s latest series of acrylic paintings pushes this language into a new phase in which the shapes on the canvases continue to self-confidently assert their own presence, yet begin to move beyond an earlier, more matter-of-fact reliance on organic and visceral associations.

Twisted Figures reflects a subtle turn in Hughes’s paintings toward motifs that are slightly more elusive in content, while retaining the beautiful but vaguely stomach-churning core of his earlier works. Many of the latest pieces feature the same intense, warm palette and pseudo-anatomical imagery set against flat monochromatic backgrounds, such as Green Ovals, which presents a smooth fleshlike surface against which brightly rendered rolling forms in pink, white, and orange suggest intestines, buttocks, and/or reproductive organs. Yet patches of textile-like patterning and a handful of amorphous shapes scattered throughout hint at a much wider range of associations, from soft pillows to eerie but strangely inviting otherworldly landscapes.

In some of the new paintings, Hughes sets up a tension between more organic, down-to-earth colors—such as the duller hamburger/flesh pink in Untitled (Taupe) —and contorted masses that are much harder to pin down. Still other canvases veer in the opposite direction by merging undulations of vivid, carnivalesque blues, pinks, oranges, or greens with somber dark swathes into curves that evoke chaotic balloon sculptures or failed attempts to wring order from unruly sausages of brute matter. In Untitled (Golden Yellow) and Red Wrap, the brushstrokes begin to assert themselves in a way that seems to subtly threaten the integrity of the forms they comprise, thereby highlighting the importance of paint as the essential substrate for Hughes’s cheerful-yet-disquieting images. The juxtaposition of painterly effects (rounded forms and illusionistic volumes) with more graphic elements (flat, opaque backgrounds and sharp edges) strongly reinforces this message. The result is a potent comment on the powerful tension between medium and image that has haunted painting for as long as abstraction has existed, or perhaps since the first images were daubed on a cave wall millennia ago.

For further information, please contact 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel by phone at 1.917.701.3338, or by e-mail at info@532gallery.com

532 Gallery is pleased to present new works by Marie-Dolma Chophel and Lennart Rieder.

Marie-Dolma Chophel’s works are inspired by topography and integrate 3D structures with organic forms and colors to form an abstract landscape of imaginary places. She graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, France. Marie-Dolma’s work has been shown in the U.S., including recent exhibitions at the Fleming Museum and at the Dorsky Museum, and in London, Paris and Hong Kong. She lives and works in New York and Paris.

Armando Marino

Composing a whimsical wintry mash up of abstract and figurative art to provide us all a rather philosophical light on the freedom of art, no matter what eye the perspective is derived from. “A work of art doesn’t have to be explained. If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn’t touch you, I have failed.” -Louise Bourgeois or perhaps more simply put, “Art for art’s sake” as best muttered by James McNeill Whistler, and as best served as Armando Mariño’s inspiration in his latest solo exhibition.

In the case of New Paintings After The Long Winter Mariño’s color moods range greatly, both portraying play on the exhibition’s title literally and figuratively. Gloomy colors with such depth within the strokes its almost impossible not to feel the arctic angst of Mariño’s artistic struggles. With that said, there are also many radiant colors that are rather jubilant, piercing through said New Paintings After The Long Winter like spring time. Mariño painted his pieces upon both large canvas and paper with oil paint, paper in his opinion allows him to dwell on the composition and subject more accurately. Paper gives him the opportunity to paint fast and keep up with the fast pace of his mind as he organizes colors and concepts.

Marino’s work is included in these current exhibitions:Post Picasso-Contemporary Reactions, Museu Picasso, Barcelona, SpainWithout Masks: Contemporary Afro Cuban Art, The von Christierson Collection /Watch Hill Foundation
Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Canada

Tanja Selzer

through April 26, 2014

Ticklish motifs await us in Selzer’s current series Meet me in the trees. Following on the heels of Sabotage, No Tears for the Creatures of the Night, Mind Candy and Cadavre Exquis, we find barely dressed and nude figures in the bushes. This is actually a classical motif in art history, and an extensively exhibited sujet with prominent progenitors such as Botticelli and Rubens and Manet and Cézanne and Picasso—and many many more. To be fair, we ought to mention Paula Modersohn-Becker as well: the very artist who, in 1906, painted the first nude self-portrait. These days we believe we’ve seen everything. But Tanja Selzer would not be Tanja Selzer, had she not succeeded in breathing new and vibrant life into this otherwise hackneyed theme. In view of her new works, it appears as if Selzer conceives of the term “nude” (in German Akt) in its original sense as something derived from the concepts of “actus”—thus gesticulation—and of “agere”—which means “to set in motion”.

Her motifs are screenshots from the internet’s worldwide photo album. Outdoor moments that could have taken place anywhere. Scarcely compromising, when you see them on your computer screen. On the other hand, these paintings are not only of considerable size; they also show the bodies in a field of color that appears frightening and irrational, yet simultaneously pleasurable thanks to the way it’s been ecstatically painted. There is something absurd about the manner in which these skin-toned forms have strayed into this ineffable world of colorful abstractions. And it is precisely this contradiction that piques our curiosity and challenges us. At close glance the ecstasy is even more visible and palpable. Thus the forms in the back- and foreground—the shadows of the people and of the bushes, the colors of clothing and plants—all blend together in a floral-vegetable act of love. The love-play is an immediate and an intimate one, befitting the moment depicted and the detail chosen by the artist from the plenitude of materials available to her. Selzer’s subtle painting techniques have been adapted to suit the theme portrayed here. Powerful, richly contrastive strokes alternate with gentle rhythmic glazing. Withexceptional dramaturgical skill the artist guides the gaze of the spectator across the diversity of skillfully and picturesquely staged scenes towards a putative highpoint. The highpoint itself remains vague. As is often the case, it is up to us to imagine more fully in our fantasy the scene depicted, and to enjoy it for what it is—a painted canvas, but painted in an exceedingly pleasurable manner.

With her new series, Selzer alludes back to the early history of the nude— age when the nude had yet to be rarefied religiously and morally, but instead paid homage, first and foremost, to the cult of fertility. Thus, in the works of her current series Meet me in the trees, Selzer not only probes the depths of the laws of painting in an exceptionally adept fashion, but also plays with the strange attitudes of a society that is apparently forced to withdraw back into the bushes, wearied by the sheer surfeit of virtual pornography.

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel is proud to present the first U.S. solo show of performance artist Nadja Verena Marcin. This exhibition is held concurrently with the landmark fifth biennial of PERFORMA in New York City.

A highlight of the show will be the world premiere of Triple F, a video of a turbulent future society where the relationships of mind and body are out of control. Inspired by the 1976 science-fiction cult film Logan’s Run, Triple F explores a world ruled by three women through their thoughts. It was shot in Germany at the neo-Renaissance Rheda castle, ’70s shopping mall Marler Stern, and historical brewery Dortmunder U. Its production was supported by Film and Media Foundation NRW, Düsseldorf.

The 532 Gallery show will also feature Zero Gravity, a stunning piece of performance art that imaginatively combines art and science. Floating weightless in a plane over Florida, Marcin revisits Friedrich Nietzsche’s Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, going beyond the assertion that “God is dead” to explore the deep emotional quality of the text: “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward in any direction? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?” Zero Gravity is a work of art that takes the audience to a new level of consciousness of both body and mind. It is sponsored by Aurora Aerospace, Florida,and WARP, Belgium.